Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC have developed a system that’s enabling a man with quadriplegia to experience the sensation of touch through a robotic arm that he controls with his brain.

Researchers have developed a wireless brain interface that allows monkeys to control the movements of a robotic wheelchair using their thoughts alone. The breakthrough suggests that similar interfaces could allow severely paralyzed individuals to navigate all sorts of robotic devices with their minds.

Inside Doris Taylor’s lab at the Texas Heart Institute are ethereal white pig hearts, stripped of their cells and now a blank slate of an organ.

Removing cells from an organ is fairly simple for scientists like Taylor. Rebuilding the organ by injecting stem cells is the tricky part.

But that’s exactly what Taylor hopes to do: grow a human heart by injecting human stem cells into a “decellularized” organ.

Continue reading “Houston establishes itself as a pioneer in regenerative medicine” »

It probably goes without saying, but medicine has improved a lot in modern times. No one would willingly go back to the days of sketchy anesthetics and experimental surgery.

We know a lot more about what ails the body and how to treat disease.

But could we do better? Sure. Some conditions yet confound doctors. Patients still suffer. As much as the situation has improved—some things haven’t changed a bit.

Continue reading “We’ll Soon Trust AI More Than Doctors to Diagnose Disease” »

It’s the closest we’ve come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab.

As the WHO announces support of a sugary drinks tax, are we wasting resources tackling obesity over aging and age-related disease?

Highly educated workers aren’t safe from automation.

If you didn’t hate spiders enough, here’s something else: Their viruses are now venomous, too.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne have developed a way to radically miniaturise a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine using atomic-scale quantum computer technology.

Capable of imaging the structure of a single bio-molecule, the new system would overcome significant technological challenges and provide an important new tool for biotechnology and drug discovery.

The work was published today in Nature Communications, and was led by Prof Lloyd Hollenberg at the University of Melbourne, working closely with researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) to design the quantum molecular microscope.